For months, explosive devices have been detonating in front of buildings in the region around Cologne. Investigators are faced with a mystery – one thing is clear: behind it all is organized crime and a gang war that will probably not end for some time.
For weeks, bomb attacks have kept people in North Rhine-Westphalia on tenterhooks. In the Cologne area, there have now been around two dozen detonations within twelve weeks. Most recently, another explosion occurred in Wachtberg-Adendorf near Bonn on Sunday night. No one was injured. The police are currently investigating whether the attacks are all connected. The incident on Saturday morning in Cologne-Niehl, in which an unknown person fired several shots at a watch shop, is said to be unrelated, it was said.
Although the exact connections are still largely unclear, investigators are already certain that organized crime is behind the crimes.
Investigators see explosions as the signature of the Mocro Mafia
“There are obviously open accounts in the milieu that still need to be settled,” said the head of the Cologne criminal police, Michael Esser, at a press conference last week. What exactly this is about is not yet known, at least not to the public. However, connections to organized crime in the Netherlands are obvious. Initial evidence of this is already available. The focus here is primarily on the so-called Mocro Mafia, a network of Dutch drug dealers, some of whom are of Moroccan origin. They are also said to be responsible for many of the ATM bombings that have recently taken place in North Rhine-Westphalia and Bavaria. The threats of explosives at doorsteps also bear the Mocro Mafia’s signature.
Detective blames drug policy
The impression that gang crime in the Netherlands is increasingly shifting to Germany is not wrong. Mafia investigator and police officer Oliver Huth made this clear in an interview with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ): “Holland must serve as a warning to us,” said Huth, referring to the drug policy there. He believes that the partial legalization of cannabis, which came into effect on April 1, is also partly responsible for the current situation. Criminal gangs are taking advantage of the lack of structures on the market and taking over the black market – and not just in the cannabis sector. In July, investigators confirmed that they had seized a record amount of 35 tons of cocaine in the port of Hamburg. Goods worth 2.6 billion euros. Huth was already certain at the time: This would only fuel the conflict between the gangs.
Whether the series of explosions is actually connected to this and a drug war between the gangs can only be guessed at the moment. According to information from Der Spiegel, investigators believe that a suspected theft of hundreds of kilograms of marijuana from a warehouse in Cologne could be the trigger and that gangs are now hunting the thieves. The investigation is in full swing, according to the police.
What has happened so far
The first explosion took place on June 25th in Solingen. A 17-year-old Dutchman dropped a bottle containing a liquid. It exploded and he died. From then on, a series of bombs were detonated in front of apartment buildings and single-family homes in Cologne, Duisburg, Düsseldorf and Bonn. There were also attacks in front of a nightclub and in a fashion store in Cologne. Most recently, a watch shop in Cologne was shot at several times, and on Sunday there was an explosion in front of a house near Bonn.
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